(Credits: Far Out / Bruce Springsteen)
Fri 2 January 2026 2:00, UK
When reflecting on his career, Bruce Springsteen looked back to the 1990s as “a lost period” for him. “I didn’t do a lot of work,” he stated. “Some people would say I didn’t do my best work.”
The end of the 1980s marked the disbandment of the E Street Band, with Springsteen placing the band on an indefinite hiatus, and he wanted to experience working and touring with other musicians, outside of the familiar. “I lost sight,” he reflected on his decision during an interview with Rolling Stone, “I didn’t know what to do next with them,” and during this interim, Springsteen “went Hollywood”, as fans scornfully accused, moving to Los Angeles and choosing to work with session musicians for his eventual double-album release of 1992’s Human Touch and Lucky Town.
The reviews for these collections ranged from mixed to unfavourable, and Springsteen devotees were unsure of the musician’s choice to stray from his roots. But Springsteen had new priorities, including the expansion of his family, with his three children born between 1990 and 1994.
By 1995, however, Springsteen had had a change of heart, reuniting the E Street Band in the studio to work on his Greatest Hits compilation album, which would feature the first new material with his backing band since the late 1980s. After these sessions, Springsteen ventured into a prolific writing period, returning to form as his lyrics began to, once again, contemplate the lives of working-class America. He’d come across a book, 1985’s Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, a study of homelessness that forced him to reckon with the disparity between working classes in the 1980s and 90s.
“There were people coming in who’d made good livings previously and been able to support their wives and their kids and who’d played by all the rules and done all the right things and were coming up empty-handed,” Springsteen reflected, during a performance at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 1995. The book forced him to confront a harsh reality: what if he, like so many, were to be cast aside, losing a facet of their identity?
“I read the book and I put it down and I laid awake and I thought, I only know how to do one thing. What if somebody came and told me that that one thing that I could do wasn’t necessary anymore, after I was 30 years or 40 years down the road,” he considered. “That I wasn’t needed, wasn’t useful now. How would I come home at night and face my family and see my children if they needed something to eat or something to wear? How directly it would affect the core sense of who I am and what my place is. These were people that built the bridges that we cross, the buildings we live in. Who gave up their sons to the wars that we fought.”
Springsteen continued to ruminate on these questions on ‘Youngstown’, a song about an unemployed steelworker in the titular Youngstown, Ohio. The New York Times reported that Springsteen’s narrator was partly inspired by Joe Marshall Jr, a steelworker he had read about in Journey to Nowhere, who worked in the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office for over two decades after leaving the steel industry.
“My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down,” he sings, “Here darlin’ in Youngstown,” referring not to an assumed woman, but to a real blast furnace at the Youngstown steelworks, the Jeanette Blast Furnace. It was common to appoint nicknames to blast furnaces at steelworks, and “Jenny” was named after the daughter of WA Thomas, the president of Brier Hill Steel. Imagining Springsteen’s narrator singing to a furnace, rather than a woman, adds to the song’s sombre tone, showing a dedication to honest work that went largely unnoticed, echoing the gap between the working and upper classes.
“Now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed, once I made you rich enough,” he sings, “Rich enough to forget my name.”
‘Youngstown’ appears on 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, named for John Steinbeck’s character in 1939’s The Grapes of Wrath, an apt reference for an album that, like the novel, is centred on economic strife during periods of American turmoil, developing its characters with each song, their stories told through primarily acoustic melodies that, in turn, highlight the darker, bleak tone. The collection showed Springsteen’s return to overt social commentary in his writing, likened to Born in the USA and Nebraska.
‘Youngstown’ would open the gates for Springsteen to step into and explore more topics within the realm of wealth disparities in America.
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